Table of Contents

State Court Statistics, 2009 (ICPSR 34081)

Principal Investigator(s):National Center for State Courts

Summary:

This data collection provides comparable measures of state
appellate and trial court caseloads by type of case for the 50 states,
the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. Court caseloads are
tabulated according to generic reporting categories developed by the
Court Statistics Project (CSP) Committee of the Conference of State Court
Administrators. These categories describe differences in the unit of
count and the point of count when compiling each court's caseload.
Major areas of investig... (more info)

This data collection provides comparable measures of state
appellate and trial court caseloads by type of case for the 50 states,
the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. Court caseloads are
tabulated according to generic reporting categories developed by the
Court Statistics Project (CSP) Committee of the Conference of State Court
Administrators. These categories describe differences in the unit of
count and the point of count when compiling each court's caseload.
Major areas of investigation include (1) case filings in state
appellate and trial courts, (2) case processing and dispositions in
state appellate and trial courts, and (3) appellate opinions. The trial caseload consists of civil, domestic relations, criminal, juvenile, and traffic violation cases. The appellate caseload consists of appeal by right, appeal by permission, death penalty, and original proceeding/other appellate matter cases.

Methodology

Study Design:

Information for the Court Statistics Project's (CSP) national caseload databases comes from published and unpublished sources supplied by state court administrators and appellate court clerks. Published data are typically taken from official state court annual reports and Web sites, so they take many forms and vary greatly in detail. Data from published sources are often supplemented by unpublished data received from the state courts in many formats, including internal management memoranda and computer-generated output. States also report and verify data electronically through spreadsheet templates provided by the Court Statistics Project.

The CSP data collection effort to build a comprehensive statistical profile of the work of state appellate and trial courts nationally is underway throughout the year. Extensive telephone contacts and follow-up correspondence are used to collect missing data, confirm the accuracy of available data, and determine the legal jurisdiction of each court. Information is also collected on the number of judges per court or court system (from annual reports, offices of state court administrators, and appellate court clerks), the state populations (based on United States Bureau of the Census revised estimates), and special characteristics regarding subject matter jurisdiction and court structure.

Data Source:

Published annual reports of administrative court
offices and unpublished statistics provided by state administrative
offices of the court and clerks of state appellate courts.

Extent of Processing: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of
disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major
statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to
these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection: